Fracture Mechanics Application in Thermoelastic States

Abstract

Thermal stress analysis is one of the most important subjects in engineering and technology. Several attempts have been so far made for analysis of thermoelastic problems in steady heat conduction states by the boundary element method (Rizzo and Shippy, 1978; Danson, 1981, for example). However, as far as the authors are aware, there are few investigations for thermal stress analysis in transient heat conduction states, although the transient heat conduction problems are often studied by means of the boundary element method (Wrobel and Brebbia, 1981). This is partly because the boundary integral formulation includes inevitably domain integrals which arise due to the temperature distributions in space and time and in the transient heat conduction states they can not be transformed into the corresponding boundary integrals. Therefore, we have to innovate a more efficient numerical implementation for such problems.